I didn't want to go, but I went. I wasn't consulted. It was okay with me, though. It's very flattering to be shown off proudly by a parent when you are a somewhat prodigal-in-the-sense-of-parable child, returning to the fold after a prolonged absence for which you can no longer remember the rationale.* Like everybody, I'm a sucker for flattery, and parental pride is worth basking in for me. Off I went.
*(What did I ever see in academia?--I mean, past the undergraduate level? How long have I been unhappy with my career choices without realizing that? I like what I am doing so much, now, that I am befuddled and struck dumb and foolish when I try to say why I have not been Out Making A Living for a longer time.)
Mom and Robert had a business dinner to attend, an annual thank you dinner thrown munificently and lavishly by Mom's long-time investment partner and colleague. I went after work, with them, after the Reading Of The Poo Sample Documents (see previous post). The host greeted me graciously and at long last, and I felt at home despite my not knowing anyone in person. I knew many, many of them well through Mom's anecdotes. My boss was there, which was great-- I really like my boss. And the other people my mother works with were there, and made me very warmly welcome.
Nice, nice people on an interpersonal level. Warm, lovely, salt of the earth, when you've got them face to face. I put it that way, because most of them are SUV-driving, energy-guzzling, not-recycling, land-lording, beef-munching, champagne-drinking, McDonald's-drive-thru-ing, varmint-shooting, golf-playing, cowboy-boot-wearing, homeless-loathing, Texas-worshiping, tax-dodging, pro-life-anti-choice thinking, God-fearing, Muslim-hating, Grace-saying, baby-sacrificing Republicans. Okay, okay... maybe that's excessive. Not all of them say Grace.
(We said Grace.)
In short: the rich and powerful. The movers and shakers. And people who like to consider themselves oh-so-very-down-to-earth even while they discuss quantities of resource that would simply puzzle the majority of us who are employees of the service industry. (They do have a lovely collection of mock-genuine cowboy catch-phrases: "we live out in the skinny branches" was my favorite of last night.)
We mingled and sat, three long tables of at least 24 people per table. I had the novel feeling that if I even whispered the heathen words "blue state" in this company, I would be strung up like a New Yorker in a Pace salsa commercial. But it's okay. I've got training as an anthropologist, and I figured I could sit among those with whom I shared little (like, oh, say, for instance, the conditions of having a "church family," financial solvency, or dental insurance) with the same relative comfort level I would feel among a gathering of very loving, welcoming members of the Shining Path.**
**(No. I do not support "terrism." Go directly to hell if you suspect I do; do not pass Go, do not collect $200.)
I ran over possible warding mantras in my mind, which I could recite in order to repel attacks: flat tax, fence the border, super-size it.
It was really very nice. There were short, invited speeches: one talked about his church so I'm afraid I mercilessly tuned the rest of it out until he said Grace for us, then other speeches followed during the soup and salad courses. One told us how he planned to gentrify a city recently devastated by an earthquake, as it rebuilt; one told us how to dodge property taxes through charity and investment; one told us how, as a local politician, he was bringing a Texan-inspired tracking system for the disaster-displaced to a telephone near you. (Well, near me, anyway, but that's not nearly as well represented a phrase in advertising as the other.) But the Illuminati-izing died down sometime before the barbecue and hey-we-tried-to-make-it-vegetarian arrived (not that I've been very vegetarian since I arrived... this, too, shall pass. Just not as fast as it would if I were getting enough fiber.)
Holy shit, am I ever out of my depth. I am swimming among the sharks, and I just have to hope that my rather patchy chainmail dive suit of moral purity can protect me when my political, economic, and social positions inevitably act as chum upon the waters.
Mmm, chum. We'll see. Zombie sharkocalypse, anyone?
For dessert they brought us root beer floats, which delighted everyone. And that soothed me, really. How scary can someone be when they're eating hard-frozen ice cream out of a glass of root beer with a sticky spoon?
If I vanish, it was the Gnomes of Zurich what did it. Remember me.
Wednesday, February 7, 2007
Blogging my brother: I won't be having the sampler...
Last night I came home to find my brother heaving around things in his garage, which will become my storage unit in the imminent future. The garage wears other hats (if I can get away with that metaphor): home for his Harley Davidson bike, which is mostly a gorgeous knick-knack for him; laundry room; home for clotheslines; home of boffer weapons and LARPing gear; repository of strange aromas, empty boxes, clay pigeons, half-filled cabinets stuffed with the uncategorizable flotsam of a life lived with many hobbies; and coldest floor in the West. In this, it is like other Californian garages. My mother's is the front door to her home, which does not stop her from drowning it in clutter so that only the very tidy storage shelves full of plastic-boxed keepsakes around the edge and the exactly-her-SUV-sized space where she parks are vacant.
(The clutter in her garage is mostly food; I come by my strange purchasing habits honestly, as during the winter or when stressed I tend to stockpile staple foods and snacks, and so does she. I'm talking abnormal levels of squirrel-preparing-for-winter zombie apocalypse bunker stockpiling, here. My friend April once had a dream wherein my mom bought so much margarine she could neither fit it all in the fridge, the freezer, nor the freezer in the garage-- it was, she explained with uncharacteristically dotty dream logic, on sale.)
(While I'm on the subject of zombie apocalypse, even though I'm really not... I got lunch from the Cookie Crock Warehouse today -- which, some of you may remember, is on my just-in-case map -- and I can tell you there's hardly a more zombieable grocery store anywhere. To the good, it has an impossibly large selection of Asian and Mexican foods. It's also two doors over from my workplace. Handy.)
Back to Robert. Sorry about that.
So, we went inside, and sat down on the couch. He brought a big package with him. It's been a couple days of novel packages: the other day we received a box full of an empty box in the mail. Evidently this is how Comcast does its business... it mails you, fully assembled, an empty box so that you can mail back the cable-box. It does make for a damn entertaining package. Like Russian dolls, only with postage affixed, and not as pretty. Anyway, this was another package, NOT full of Comcast's empty box. No, this was a special box. It also had an empty box in it-- among other things-- but this one was a small, return-postaged carton addressed, rather cyberpunkishly I thought, to Diagnos-Tech.
Me, canting my head to read the upside-down little carton label: "Diagnos-Tech?"
Robert: "It's for the saliva and stool samples my witch-doctor wants."
Me: "Hahahahahahaha... hahaha."
It should be explained at this point that Rob's "witch-doctor" is a real doctor, or at least this one is. He is second in a series of two witch-doctors. The first one is a holistic medicine guy who may or may not have credentials. This guy, the second one, is evidently the holder of a doctorate from a fully accredited coven of witch-doctory: he is using science-- diagnos-tech, even-- to troubleshoot Robert's digestive tract.
Robert, offhand, while unfolding tightly folded, printed instructions he had extracted from a plastic baggie of small vials: "What's witch-doctor in Spanish?"
Me: "Actually cures you, or does hocus pocus and tells fortunes?"
Rob: "Cures you."
Me: "Curandero."
Rob: "And the other?"
Me: "Brujo. But that just means 'witch,' pretty much."
Rob, scowling at his instructions, and absently: "Hunh." Then he sneered. I should explain about Robert's sneer-- it is magnificently and regally scornful, expressive both of his sense of humor and his contempt for things he finds really stupid-- an impressive expression I have practiced before a mirror to duplicate, and have always failed at copying. "What the--"
Me, raising eyebrow: "Something odd?"
Rob, reading: "Rinse mouth in very cold water for 3-5 minutes, then place special absorbent pad, enclosed, under tongue and hold for 2-3 minutes. Place pad in saliva sample vial and return to Diagnos-Tech in enclosed package. Repeat four times." Then he railed against the prohibitions: no mouthwash, oral hygeine of any kind, gum, mints, antacids, vitamins, minerals, caffeine, onions, cabbage, garlic, marmalade, marmosets, oral sex, chicken necks, or auto wrecks for 24 hours before the test, and pretty much nothing at all for an hour before.
Me, snickering: "Sucks to be you."
Rob: "Oh, my God. They want me to do this at four different times of the day. But they only enclosed one sponge."
Me: "Maybe they want you to use the same one every time."
Rob, not so easily fooled now that he's a grown-up: "Ew. I'll just drool into their container."
I grinned. He shook his head in disgust and picked up the other package. This time, I was way ahead of him. Laughing: "Is that for your poo samples?"
Robert: "Yes." Reading. Then, the wince of disgust coupled with the sneer of disbelief. "Ugh." He held up a dinky vial. "How am I even supposed to get the sample in there?!"
Me: "No, no. You see, you drop a deuce on a paper plate. Then you get them a smear with their handy-dandy swab."
I wasn't far off. They suggest a layer of cellophane stretched over the toilet receptacle, under the seat. And it's not a swab, it's a card thingy. He made disgusted noises for a while between reading me passages and over the sound of my crows of laughter.
(I should probably mention the phrase, "don't discard the liquid," because they did. Hey, don't blame me.)
I thought he couldn't be more annoyed or grossed out-- annoyed, because if you think the prohibitions list is vexing for the saliva sample, as he does, the poo sample list is simply breathtaking in its sadism; grossed out, because, well, who wants to play in their own poopie? But then he found the kicker...
You take these samples over a four day period.
In the meantime, you store the previously gathered samples in the refrigerator-- but not frozen.
"I don't want my poo in my fridge!" he howled.
Me, still laughing although I was doing my best to look at my book and look serious: "I don't want your poo in your fridge either. How about you do this after we get our own place?"
"Gaaaah."
Rubbing it in as only big sisters can do: "I do find it amusing. You won't even store garlicky food in the fridge because it smells things up."
Robert: "Gaaaah. That has to violate health code rules."
Me: "Nobody's inspecting your apartment, dude. Just sacrifice one of your veggie drawers to it. And it gives you a place to use one of your million pieces of tupperware." (He has the all-time biggest collection of mismatched plastic doohickeys I have ever seen. He's offered to pay me to sort them and toss the orphaned ones. It should give you insight that even as skint as I am, I have not yet taken him up on it.)
Robert: "That's it! I'll sacrifice a tupperware to that."
Me: "It has to be one with a lid, though."
Him: "Yes, a tight fitting lid."
Me: "And you have to throw it away."
Him: "Yes, of course I'll throw it away."
Me: "You going to do this?"
Him: "Of course. I want to justify the $1400 I paid this guy-- also, I have to send the crap out before I put this crap in." He went on to show me no less than EIGHT BOTTLES of different nutritional supplements prescribed for him to take every day. I'm all for health and I'm sure he's dedicated, but it's all I can do to take a multivitamin and a calcium supplement or two every day... I hope he can stand to dine on a full meal of pills daily, but he is the guy with the virgin Harley.
(Sorry, Rob-- let me show you my collection of half-finished paintings and you'll know I'm not knockin' ya.)
So he has to go a week without eating pretty much anything that would be a dietary staple, without taking ANY supplements or medication of any kind (even pain meds and analgesics), without drinking either the lemonade he loves or the caffeine he is trying to quit... in order to take eight bottles of pills he has been prescribed before Diagnos-Tech has had its cyberpunkish way with his spit and poo samples.
What comes after? What, what? I cannot wait to see. And part of me cannot wait to see what a witch-doctor charges for the real knock-down, dirty, spit-on-your-palms work, the real shit.
Viva el curanderismo!
(The clutter in her garage is mostly food; I come by my strange purchasing habits honestly, as during the winter or when stressed I tend to stockpile staple foods and snacks, and so does she. I'm talking abnormal levels of squirrel-preparing-for-winter zombie apocalypse bunker stockpiling, here. My friend April once had a dream wherein my mom bought so much margarine she could neither fit it all in the fridge, the freezer, nor the freezer in the garage-- it was, she explained with uncharacteristically dotty dream logic, on sale.)
(While I'm on the subject of zombie apocalypse, even though I'm really not... I got lunch from the Cookie Crock Warehouse today -- which, some of you may remember, is on my just-in-case map -- and I can tell you there's hardly a more zombieable grocery store anywhere. To the good, it has an impossibly large selection of Asian and Mexican foods. It's also two doors over from my workplace. Handy.)
Back to Robert. Sorry about that.
So, we went inside, and sat down on the couch. He brought a big package with him. It's been a couple days of novel packages: the other day we received a box full of an empty box in the mail. Evidently this is how Comcast does its business... it mails you, fully assembled, an empty box so that you can mail back the cable-box. It does make for a damn entertaining package. Like Russian dolls, only with postage affixed, and not as pretty. Anyway, this was another package, NOT full of Comcast's empty box. No, this was a special box. It also had an empty box in it-- among other things-- but this one was a small, return-postaged carton addressed, rather cyberpunkishly I thought, to Diagnos-Tech.
Me, canting my head to read the upside-down little carton label: "Diagnos-Tech?"
Robert: "It's for the saliva and stool samples my witch-doctor wants."
Me: "Hahahahahahaha... hahaha."
It should be explained at this point that Rob's "witch-doctor" is a real doctor, or at least this one is. He is second in a series of two witch-doctors. The first one is a holistic medicine guy who may or may not have credentials. This guy, the second one, is evidently the holder of a doctorate from a fully accredited coven of witch-doctory: he is using science-- diagnos-tech, even-- to troubleshoot Robert's digestive tract.
Robert, offhand, while unfolding tightly folded, printed instructions he had extracted from a plastic baggie of small vials: "What's witch-doctor in Spanish?"
Me: "Actually cures you, or does hocus pocus and tells fortunes?"
Rob: "Cures you."
Me: "Curandero."
Rob: "And the other?"
Me: "Brujo. But that just means 'witch,' pretty much."
Rob, scowling at his instructions, and absently: "Hunh." Then he sneered. I should explain about Robert's sneer-- it is magnificently and regally scornful, expressive both of his sense of humor and his contempt for things he finds really stupid-- an impressive expression I have practiced before a mirror to duplicate, and have always failed at copying. "What the--"
Me, raising eyebrow: "Something odd?"
Rob, reading: "Rinse mouth in very cold water for 3-5 minutes, then place special absorbent pad, enclosed, under tongue and hold for 2-3 minutes. Place pad in saliva sample vial and return to Diagnos-Tech in enclosed package. Repeat four times." Then he railed against the prohibitions: no mouthwash, oral hygeine of any kind, gum, mints, antacids, vitamins, minerals, caffeine, onions, cabbage, garlic, marmalade, marmosets, oral sex, chicken necks, or auto wrecks for 24 hours before the test, and pretty much nothing at all for an hour before.
Me, snickering: "Sucks to be you."
Rob: "Oh, my God. They want me to do this at four different times of the day. But they only enclosed one sponge."
Me: "Maybe they want you to use the same one every time."
Rob, not so easily fooled now that he's a grown-up: "Ew. I'll just drool into their container."
I grinned. He shook his head in disgust and picked up the other package. This time, I was way ahead of him. Laughing: "Is that for your poo samples?"
Robert: "Yes." Reading. Then, the wince of disgust coupled with the sneer of disbelief. "Ugh." He held up a dinky vial. "How am I even supposed to get the sample in there?!"
Me: "No, no. You see, you drop a deuce on a paper plate. Then you get them a smear with their handy-dandy swab."
I wasn't far off. They suggest a layer of cellophane stretched over the toilet receptacle, under the seat. And it's not a swab, it's a card thingy. He made disgusted noises for a while between reading me passages and over the sound of my crows of laughter.
(I should probably mention the phrase, "don't discard the liquid," because they did. Hey, don't blame me.)
I thought he couldn't be more annoyed or grossed out-- annoyed, because if you think the prohibitions list is vexing for the saliva sample, as he does, the poo sample list is simply breathtaking in its sadism; grossed out, because, well, who wants to play in their own poopie? But then he found the kicker...
You take these samples over a four day period.
In the meantime, you store the previously gathered samples in the refrigerator-- but not frozen.
"I don't want my poo in my fridge!" he howled.
Me, still laughing although I was doing my best to look at my book and look serious: "I don't want your poo in your fridge either. How about you do this after we get our own place?"
"Gaaaah."
Rubbing it in as only big sisters can do: "I do find it amusing. You won't even store garlicky food in the fridge because it smells things up."
Robert: "Gaaaah. That has to violate health code rules."
Me: "Nobody's inspecting your apartment, dude. Just sacrifice one of your veggie drawers to it. And it gives you a place to use one of your million pieces of tupperware." (He has the all-time biggest collection of mismatched plastic doohickeys I have ever seen. He's offered to pay me to sort them and toss the orphaned ones. It should give you insight that even as skint as I am, I have not yet taken him up on it.)
Robert: "That's it! I'll sacrifice a tupperware to that."
Me: "It has to be one with a lid, though."
Him: "Yes, a tight fitting lid."
Me: "And you have to throw it away."
Him: "Yes, of course I'll throw it away."
Me: "You going to do this?"
Him: "Of course. I want to justify the $1400 I paid this guy-- also, I have to send the crap out before I put this crap in." He went on to show me no less than EIGHT BOTTLES of different nutritional supplements prescribed for him to take every day. I'm all for health and I'm sure he's dedicated, but it's all I can do to take a multivitamin and a calcium supplement or two every day... I hope he can stand to dine on a full meal of pills daily, but he is the guy with the virgin Harley.
(Sorry, Rob-- let me show you my collection of half-finished paintings and you'll know I'm not knockin' ya.)
So he has to go a week without eating pretty much anything that would be a dietary staple, without taking ANY supplements or medication of any kind (even pain meds and analgesics), without drinking either the lemonade he loves or the caffeine he is trying to quit... in order to take eight bottles of pills he has been prescribed before Diagnos-Tech has had its cyberpunkish way with his spit and poo samples.
What comes after? What, what? I cannot wait to see. And part of me cannot wait to see what a witch-doctor charges for the real knock-down, dirty, spit-on-your-palms work, the real shit.
Viva el curanderismo!
Monday, February 5, 2007
Friends help you move. True friends help you move...
No, not "bodies." What's wrong with you people?! Sheesh.
True friends help you move on Super Bowl Sunday, in Chicago, when the Bears were playing, in -30 degree weather (okay, with windchill, but it's not like you can stop the wind from blowing, is it?)
Sweet. Merciful. Jeebus.
You people deserve a medal. Yes, you, Greg, and you, Travis, and you, Jayson.
One thing that people in my recently departed line of work like to work their jaws about* is the question of whether or not true altruism exists. Hippies and religious people mouth platitudes about casting bread upon the water and how it will return to you (oops, maybe that's actually a parable or something-- anyway, it's Ecclesiastes 11:1), but you see that that one has the not-altruistic thing built right in... hey, it's comin' back. Anthropologists like to talk about "generalized reciprocity"-- the kind where you give stuff and labor to your culture-mates and stuff and labor sometime, from someone, gets back to you, but not on a fixed date. Other anthropologists and behaviorists like to ponder whether giving one's life to save a stranger's child would be altruism or not... because you do, after all, get to engage in cultural reproduction by ensuring that a younger generation carries on your values and knowledge. And of course decency and uncommon service and/or valor are activities that can translate into other forms of social capital. It can hurt when nobody notices what a stand-up person you are; even Chewbacca roars when he is overlooked, when he has done exactly the same job that gets his companions shiny medals and honors.
Altruism is a fuzzy thing. I, for one, believe that it exists. Yes, people do give of themselves every day in ways that they do not expect to be repaid. They do it because it gives them character. They do it because they have character already. They do it because it makes life better. They do it because they have an inner compass that says they ought to... and I, for one, don't think that compass is always pointing to "next it's my turn."
One thing I know is that my friends don't expect much of us directly in return. We're moving far away, and most of them have already been victims of my execrable discipline as a correspondent. The circumstances under which it would even be possible for me to repay their kindness would arise again only under conditions so rare as to boggle the mind.
But several things apply. 1) You have character, gentlemen. Oh so much character. You have my unbridled admiration and my awe, and I am grateful not only for your help but that I got to know you. 2) I am inspired, and will do something huge for somebody the next time, and every time, the opportunity presents. 3) I got your back, and I will get you back. If you ever need a body... er, a household moved in freakishly inclement weather on a festival day, you know who to call.
Bread on the waters? Maybe. At the very least, it's gonna come back as pizza and beer. My intentions are that it come back as far, far more.
____
*Oh yeah. At first I mistyped "work their jawas about." I thought I'd share that typo-- the idea of whipping those poor, little, glowing-eyed, cloaked opportunists into building a road or pyramid or something, or moving my frostbitten crap onto a moving van, makes my inner Darth smile.
True friends help you move on Super Bowl Sunday, in Chicago, when the Bears were playing, in -30 degree weather (okay, with windchill, but it's not like you can stop the wind from blowing, is it?)
Sweet. Merciful. Jeebus.
You people deserve a medal. Yes, you, Greg, and you, Travis, and you, Jayson.
One thing that people in my recently departed line of work like to work their jaws about* is the question of whether or not true altruism exists. Hippies and religious people mouth platitudes about casting bread upon the water and how it will return to you (oops, maybe that's actually a parable or something-- anyway, it's Ecclesiastes 11:1), but you see that that one has the not-altruistic thing built right in... hey, it's comin' back. Anthropologists like to talk about "generalized reciprocity"-- the kind where you give stuff and labor to your culture-mates and stuff and labor sometime, from someone, gets back to you, but not on a fixed date. Other anthropologists and behaviorists like to ponder whether giving one's life to save a stranger's child would be altruism or not... because you do, after all, get to engage in cultural reproduction by ensuring that a younger generation carries on your values and knowledge. And of course decency and uncommon service and/or valor are activities that can translate into other forms of social capital. It can hurt when nobody notices what a stand-up person you are; even Chewbacca roars when he is overlooked, when he has done exactly the same job that gets his companions shiny medals and honors.
Altruism is a fuzzy thing. I, for one, believe that it exists. Yes, people do give of themselves every day in ways that they do not expect to be repaid. They do it because it gives them character. They do it because they have character already. They do it because it makes life better. They do it because they have an inner compass that says they ought to... and I, for one, don't think that compass is always pointing to "next it's my turn."
One thing I know is that my friends don't expect much of us directly in return. We're moving far away, and most of them have already been victims of my execrable discipline as a correspondent. The circumstances under which it would even be possible for me to repay their kindness would arise again only under conditions so rare as to boggle the mind.
But several things apply. 1) You have character, gentlemen. Oh so much character. You have my unbridled admiration and my awe, and I am grateful not only for your help but that I got to know you. 2) I am inspired, and will do something huge for somebody the next time, and every time, the opportunity presents. 3) I got your back, and I will get you back. If you ever need a body... er, a household moved in freakishly inclement weather on a festival day, you know who to call.
Bread on the waters? Maybe. At the very least, it's gonna come back as pizza and beer. My intentions are that it come back as far, far more.
____
*Oh yeah. At first I mistyped "work their jawas about." I thought I'd share that typo-- the idea of whipping those poor, little, glowing-eyed, cloaked opportunists into building a road or pyramid or something, or moving my frostbitten crap onto a moving van, makes my inner Darth smile.
Blogging my father: "and then he went up on the roof"
Tonight, over dinner, my mom, brother, and I were chatting about parties and whatnot. My dad evidently likes sweet drinks-- cuba libre, flavored brandy, etc. My brother finds this novel, because it helps to elucidate certain stories about my dad's youthful excesses. More about this in a minute.
Alcohol tolerance varies widely among my family members. I'm afraid I inherited my dad's lightweightedness. I'm a cheap and surly drunk. My mom, who once claimed to be "allergic to alcohol" and tipped her drinks into my glass at dinner parties when I was a young teen, has waxed and waned in tolerance: as a diabetic, she does not currently drink at all.
On the other end of the spectrum, my brother, in a move brilliantly calculated either to kill him or to make him stronger, once engaged to discover just how much alcohol he had to drink to get drunk. As often follows in these circumstances, he didn't stop once he got there. He did stop one long swallow into his third fifth of vodka, because it was apple vodka, and he had been drinking the regular stuff... hence he noticed that it was the third and stopped. I will spare you the details of what happens to your friend's furniture, trenchcoat, party guests, vehicles, pets, and security deposit when you drink two and one tenth fifths of vodka. (Wow, I invented a new form of math! Take that, Fifth Third Bank!)
Anyhoo. My brother, speaking about my dad's preference for "girly drinks," or maybe the "Breakfast of Pansies," said this:
"That sheds a lot of light for me on some of the stories I know about Dad: the Mustang incident, the turning himself in to base police incident..." (Yes, I have heard both of these. They're both funny in that schadenfreude way. The Mustang incident involved rolling a Mustang down a steep hill and being fortunate enough to walk out of the thing unhurt and belligerently indignant, despite the fact that my dad remained 6'7" and the car had been dramatically remolded into something like 2'5". He walked 10 miles to find help, all alone, immediately after that accident. The base police thing involved him getting so blind drunk on the base where he works that he got very, very lost... and turned himself in to the base police so they could help him.)
I love to hear sentences like this one about my elders. I feel much less like a goof-off when it becomes clear that goofing off is a family tradition.
Mom told more stories about Dad's rare, wild moments in his youth. 1) The time he crawled up the front steps on his hands and knees drunk, an hour before his teetotaling churchy family members arrived for a party-- people who had never seen him crack a beer. 2) The time he got drunk with two of his friends the day after his best friend Doc, who lived in the other half of the house Dad & Mom had when they were young with his own wife, got a surgery to widen some part of his seminal delivery system (hell, I dunno-- they were trying to conceive and he had issues-- that's another story). Dad and the other friend were carrying Doc on their shoulders and each went his own way around a post, and Doc... slid down... and never did have a child. 3) The time he got drunk after eating a lot of Rice-A-Roni and vomited, and wailed "oh, my Rice-A-Roni, ohhh, my Rice-A-Roni" in mourning over the toilet, until chased out of the bathroom. This, my friends, is where it gets good.
"And then he went up on the roof," Mom continued. "We had to turn the hose on him to get him down, and it worked, but then he got back up there. He had found some fireflies and he would not come down until he figured out how they worked. 'How do they do that?' he would say, over and over. 'How do they light?' Eventually I told him they had teeny tiny light bulbs screwed into their bottoms, and that made it okay. He was satisfied, and we managed to get him back down."
Don't get the impression that my dad is a lush. He's not-- I have rarely seen him drunk at all. But it seems that under his placid and spokesman-of-decency exterior lurks one of the lampshade-wearing party people we see so much of on sitcoms. I wish I had such a lurker, too, but I do not. I go through an entirely different process as I drink. I think that if I were on a sitcom, drinking, I would have to be played by a tag team of actors as I became progressively drunker: Lily Tomlin in her Ernestine role, then maybe that churlish chick who plays Chloe on 24, and then something even sleepier, angrier, and less scintillating company. Like a female Steven Seagal. Eew.
It occurs to me that I rather hope that my friends have stories to tell about me that are just as preposterous, just as purple, just as mad and glad and charming as "and then she went up on the roof" and looked for the answer to fireflies.
Oh, my Rice-A-Roni. It's almost enough to drive a girl to drink.
Alcohol tolerance varies widely among my family members. I'm afraid I inherited my dad's lightweightedness. I'm a cheap and surly drunk. My mom, who once claimed to be "allergic to alcohol" and tipped her drinks into my glass at dinner parties when I was a young teen, has waxed and waned in tolerance: as a diabetic, she does not currently drink at all.
On the other end of the spectrum, my brother, in a move brilliantly calculated either to kill him or to make him stronger, once engaged to discover just how much alcohol he had to drink to get drunk. As often follows in these circumstances, he didn't stop once he got there. He did stop one long swallow into his third fifth of vodka, because it was apple vodka, and he had been drinking the regular stuff... hence he noticed that it was the third and stopped. I will spare you the details of what happens to your friend's furniture, trenchcoat, party guests, vehicles, pets, and security deposit when you drink two and one tenth fifths of vodka. (Wow, I invented a new form of math! Take that, Fifth Third Bank!)
Anyhoo. My brother, speaking about my dad's preference for "girly drinks," or maybe the "Breakfast of Pansies," said this:
"That sheds a lot of light for me on some of the stories I know about Dad: the Mustang incident, the turning himself in to base police incident..." (Yes, I have heard both of these. They're both funny in that schadenfreude way. The Mustang incident involved rolling a Mustang down a steep hill and being fortunate enough to walk out of the thing unhurt and belligerently indignant, despite the fact that my dad remained 6'7" and the car had been dramatically remolded into something like 2'5". He walked 10 miles to find help, all alone, immediately after that accident. The base police thing involved him getting so blind drunk on the base where he works that he got very, very lost... and turned himself in to the base police so they could help him.)
I love to hear sentences like this one about my elders. I feel much less like a goof-off when it becomes clear that goofing off is a family tradition.
Mom told more stories about Dad's rare, wild moments in his youth. 1) The time he crawled up the front steps on his hands and knees drunk, an hour before his teetotaling churchy family members arrived for a party-- people who had never seen him crack a beer. 2) The time he got drunk with two of his friends the day after his best friend Doc, who lived in the other half of the house Dad & Mom had when they were young with his own wife, got a surgery to widen some part of his seminal delivery system (hell, I dunno-- they were trying to conceive and he had issues-- that's another story). Dad and the other friend were carrying Doc on their shoulders and each went his own way around a post, and Doc... slid down... and never did have a child. 3) The time he got drunk after eating a lot of Rice-A-Roni and vomited, and wailed "oh, my Rice-A-Roni, ohhh, my Rice-A-Roni" in mourning over the toilet, until chased out of the bathroom. This, my friends, is where it gets good.
"And then he went up on the roof," Mom continued. "We had to turn the hose on him to get him down, and it worked, but then he got back up there. He had found some fireflies and he would not come down until he figured out how they worked. 'How do they do that?' he would say, over and over. 'How do they light?' Eventually I told him they had teeny tiny light bulbs screwed into their bottoms, and that made it okay. He was satisfied, and we managed to get him back down."
Don't get the impression that my dad is a lush. He's not-- I have rarely seen him drunk at all. But it seems that under his placid and spokesman-of-decency exterior lurks one of the lampshade-wearing party people we see so much of on sitcoms. I wish I had such a lurker, too, but I do not. I go through an entirely different process as I drink. I think that if I were on a sitcom, drinking, I would have to be played by a tag team of actors as I became progressively drunker: Lily Tomlin in her Ernestine role, then maybe that churlish chick who plays Chloe on 24, and then something even sleepier, angrier, and less scintillating company. Like a female Steven Seagal. Eew.
It occurs to me that I rather hope that my friends have stories to tell about me that are just as preposterous, just as purple, just as mad and glad and charming as "and then she went up on the roof" and looked for the answer to fireflies.
Oh, my Rice-A-Roni. It's almost enough to drive a girl to drink.
Sunday, February 4, 2007
Blogging my brother: Guitar Hero
So, Guitar Hero. My brother's been telling me this about it:
"Everybody sucks at it-- well, almost everybody. It's a great party game because almost everyone sucks, especially with a couple drinks in them, except there's usually one person at the party who's really good."
Those who know my TV watching habits may know that I am absolutely enamored with Metalocalypse. It's a brilliant show-- a Brendon Small cartoon, kind of like Home Movies, if the band that played on Brendon's movies grew up to be a metal supergroup (Dethklok) with the kind of wealth and power that real bands only dream of, and a dark consortium of illuminati trying to thwart their accidental but inevitable bringing of the apocalypse. The lead singer character, Nathan Explosion, speaks as he sings-- in a growly metal roar. Aside from "brutal," his favorite adjective seems to be "metallllllll." And I've picked it up (okay, somewhat deliberately.) And after I proselytized the virtues of Metalocalypse to Robert, he, too, picked it up.
Anyway. When he went on about something being "metallllll" to one of his friends, that friend rewarded him with a copy of Guitar Hero 2-- which has, evidently, one of Dethklok's songs on it as a bonus track.
After our Bears disappointed us at the Super Bowl, during which my dear husband and three of the best guys ever to pack a truck packed our fucking moving van in -30 weather, during the Super Bowl-- while I helped Rob with a barbecue and Super Bowl party-- I was done for the night. A couple Red Stripes in me, along with a lot of barbecue, and a long damn day of entertaining, made for a curl-up-with-a-book night.
I curled up. Robert made interesting noises, and I wondered if I had stuck him with putting away the copious leftovers by himself, so I went to investigate.
He was opening a game and installing stuff. Well and good, I thought; he was about to play a game on his Playstation.
Imagine my surprise when I came back through to get water and he was laughing himself silly, nestled in his big living room chair, with a toy guitar in his hands. And he was playing the thing by mashing its buttons rhythmically.
I peered at the screen. It's not that hard to catch onto the game. "This is Guitar Hero," I said, brilliantly.
"Yup," he replied, teeth clenched. He missed a note.
I watched what his hands were doing, and what the screen was reporting. "Ohhhh, it's all a matter of timing," I observed.
"Yeah," he said. I watched the end of the song. "You wanna try?" he asked, and gave me the little guitar.
"I guess," I said, holding it as if it were a large live scorpion. It wasn't.
It should be noted that I'm one of those people who sucks at Guitar Hero. And Robert, for whatever reason, is one of the ones that is surprisingly good. I got my little avatar booed off the stage; Rob, trying the same song per my challenge, got an 88%.
Metallllllllllll.
"Everybody sucks at it-- well, almost everybody. It's a great party game because almost everyone sucks, especially with a couple drinks in them, except there's usually one person at the party who's really good."
Those who know my TV watching habits may know that I am absolutely enamored with Metalocalypse. It's a brilliant show-- a Brendon Small cartoon, kind of like Home Movies, if the band that played on Brendon's movies grew up to be a metal supergroup (Dethklok) with the kind of wealth and power that real bands only dream of, and a dark consortium of illuminati trying to thwart their accidental but inevitable bringing of the apocalypse. The lead singer character, Nathan Explosion, speaks as he sings-- in a growly metal roar. Aside from "brutal," his favorite adjective seems to be "metallllllll." And I've picked it up (okay, somewhat deliberately.) And after I proselytized the virtues of Metalocalypse to Robert, he, too, picked it up.
Anyway. When he went on about something being "metallllll" to one of his friends, that friend rewarded him with a copy of Guitar Hero 2-- which has, evidently, one of Dethklok's songs on it as a bonus track.
After our Bears disappointed us at the Super Bowl, during which my dear husband and three of the best guys ever to pack a truck packed our fucking moving van in -30 weather, during the Super Bowl-- while I helped Rob with a barbecue and Super Bowl party-- I was done for the night. A couple Red Stripes in me, along with a lot of barbecue, and a long damn day of entertaining, made for a curl-up-with-a-book night.
I curled up. Robert made interesting noises, and I wondered if I had stuck him with putting away the copious leftovers by himself, so I went to investigate.
He was opening a game and installing stuff. Well and good, I thought; he was about to play a game on his Playstation.
Imagine my surprise when I came back through to get water and he was laughing himself silly, nestled in his big living room chair, with a toy guitar in his hands. And he was playing the thing by mashing its buttons rhythmically.
I peered at the screen. It's not that hard to catch onto the game. "This is Guitar Hero," I said, brilliantly.
"Yup," he replied, teeth clenched. He missed a note.
I watched what his hands were doing, and what the screen was reporting. "Ohhhh, it's all a matter of timing," I observed.
"Yeah," he said. I watched the end of the song. "You wanna try?" he asked, and gave me the little guitar.
"I guess," I said, holding it as if it were a large live scorpion. It wasn't.
It should be noted that I'm one of those people who sucks at Guitar Hero. And Robert, for whatever reason, is one of the ones that is surprisingly good. I got my little avatar booed off the stage; Rob, trying the same song per my challenge, got an 88%.
Metallllllllllll.
Saturday, February 3, 2007
we are doing it as hard as we can
Also, you eat your own farts. What kind of creature derives nourishment from its own farts?I shamelessly kyped this picture from another blog, so don't give me credit.
Also, here's my friend April's website-- which I think is pretty kickass.
http://www.ahaight.dreamhosters.com/
Dreaming the ridonkulous
No more Starbucks coffee and horror movies for me right before bed.
Last night there was an imp in my dreams, right before I woke up. He was singing this, to the tune of "Fly me to the Moon."
"Fry me with your fumes
And make me choke among the farts
Smell like you've been crappin' when you're
Drivin' in your car."
Gotta hand it to my sleeping brain... it can rhyme. Imagine trying to shake THAT out of your head during your morning shower. I was giggling and humming it.
Fortunately he didn't finish the song, because even that much of it is a crime against music, but he was bouncing on the bed as he sang.
The weird thing about the last couple "nightmares" (unpleasant dreams, anyway) that I have had is that they are so freakily connected with my real surroundings. In that dream, he was jumping on the bed-- but he was trying to wake me up, and the bed he was jumping on was the one I was in.
The other one, the REAL nightmare that got me up at 2:00 a.m. and had me reading all night for fear of falling asleep... in it, I don't remember anything happening. Then, a voice shouted in my ear: "THERE IS NOTHING ON YOUR LEFT." I woke up sitting bolt upright and gasping, terrified. And I searched every inch of the bed, the floor, the window, everything on my left, terrified of what might be there.
It could mean a lot of things. Pat sleeps on my left side and he wasn't there, as he is following me out. Could have been that. I'm going to have to learn to drive again. It could have been a driving test dream, I guess. It might have been in Claudette's honor, as they have removed all of the left temporal lobe and some other parts of her brain. I don't really know. All I know is that my subconscious thinks that nothing on my left is pretty scary, and that my sleepy self agrees.
More later.
Last night there was an imp in my dreams, right before I woke up. He was singing this, to the tune of "Fly me to the Moon."
"Fry me with your fumes
And make me choke among the farts
Smell like you've been crappin' when you're
Drivin' in your car."
Gotta hand it to my sleeping brain... it can rhyme. Imagine trying to shake THAT out of your head during your morning shower. I was giggling and humming it.
Fortunately he didn't finish the song, because even that much of it is a crime against music, but he was bouncing on the bed as he sang.
The weird thing about the last couple "nightmares" (unpleasant dreams, anyway) that I have had is that they are so freakily connected with my real surroundings. In that dream, he was jumping on the bed-- but he was trying to wake me up, and the bed he was jumping on was the one I was in.
The other one, the REAL nightmare that got me up at 2:00 a.m. and had me reading all night for fear of falling asleep... in it, I don't remember anything happening. Then, a voice shouted in my ear: "THERE IS NOTHING ON YOUR LEFT." I woke up sitting bolt upright and gasping, terrified. And I searched every inch of the bed, the floor, the window, everything on my left, terrified of what might be there.
It could mean a lot of things. Pat sleeps on my left side and he wasn't there, as he is following me out. Could have been that. I'm going to have to learn to drive again. It could have been a driving test dream, I guess. It might have been in Claudette's honor, as they have removed all of the left temporal lobe and some other parts of her brain. I don't really know. All I know is that my subconscious thinks that nothing on my left is pretty scary, and that my sleepy self agrees.
More later.
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